The people complaining about Court TV’s upcoming “Confessions” show are acting as if they haven’t turned on a TV in the last 10 years. If they had, they may have noticed videotaped confessions on TV during televised trials, on the news, and as part of all those crime documentaries that have proliferated on cable lately – from A&E to The Discovery Channel.

And videotaped confessions are only part of what TV networks are culling from police files these days. Why, just yesterday afternoon, I tuned in to E! Entertainment Television just in time to catch a crime-

scene photograph of Bob Crane’s nude corpse facedown in the twisted sheets of a motel bed. Bob Crane! From “Hogan’s Heroes”! On a channel with “Entertainment” as part of its name! In the afternoon!

Ewww! Gross!

With everything that’s shown on TV these days, it’s incredible to me that anyone even has the energy to complain anymore about some new and questionable, taboo-busting TV show.

This week, the debate is about “Confessions,” Court TV’s new half-hour show consisting solely of videotaped confessions. It premieres Sept. 10 with three confessions from murder suspects who were eventually convicted of their crimes. Two of the cases are well-known to New Yorkers.

The first one features Steven Smith, the homeless man who strangled and raped a doctor in her office at Bellevue Hospital in 1989. The second one is Daniel Rakowitz, the East Village pot dealer who killed his Swedish girlfriend in 1989 with a single punch to her Adam’s Apple, dismembered her and boiled her head in a stewpot.

The show’s detractors complain that there’s no context to the confessions, that Court TV is merely stringing together cheap videotape that’s readily available and then insisting that the finished product provides some sort of educational insight into the process by which confessions are obtained and recorded on videotape.

The New York Times even accused Court TV of being motivated by a “desire for an audience-grabbing hit.”

And what will you see if you’re curious enough to sample “Confessions”? You’ll see murder suspects videotaped dead-on with a stationary camera in police interrogation rooms, the date and time running across the bottom of the screen. Their interrogators are off-camera.

In one scene, a female officer asks Rakowitz what he did after he realized the Swedish girl, Monica, was dead on his apartment floor. “I dissected her body totally,” answered the long-haired pot dealer. “I just started choppin’ her up, cookin’ her meat,” he said in a voice reminiscent of Sean Penn’s in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”

By the rules we in the media all live by, Court TV has every right to use videotape in the public domain in any way it chooses. As Rakowitz’s monotonal admission that he cut up his girlfriend’s body indicates, many viewers will find “Confessions” to be rough sledding. In the end, viewers will vote with their remote-controls on whether airing videotaped confessions is a good idea or not.

In recent years, similar expressions of shock and outrage have focused on lesbian kisses on “Roseanne” and “Ellen,” fistfights on “The Jerry Springer Show,” and anything and everything on Howard Stern’s radio and TV shows.

And after each furor dies down, what happens? Nothing – they’re still fighting on “Springer,” there are more gay expressions of love on TV than ever before, and Stern is still Stern. The best advice you’re left with in every case is always: If you don’t like it, don’t watch it.

It’s a bit of wisdom that people don’t seem to like hearing, but is still the best defense against seeing things you’d rather not.